April 29, 2016

Here is the drought picture as of yesterday, which does not show the current storm in eastern Colorado and along the Eastern Slope of the southern Rockies. Wet snow has been falling at my house in the morning of the 28th and is now beginning to stick, eight to ten inches so far, as the temperature hangs just above the freezing point.

April 24, 2016

When I read several well-attested accounts of squirrels seizing songbirds that had been stunned from window collisions, I was a bit surprised.Now it's bloodthirsty prairie dogs.

For six years, [biologist John] Hoogland, his colleague Charles Brown, and a small army
of students sat in towers at the Arapaho National Wildlife Refuge in
Colorado, watching prairie dogs go about their business—foraging for
food, rearing their young, and butchering ground squirrels for sport.
For further proof that nature is relentlessly brutal, this behavior
seems to give prairie dogs an evolutionary advantage.

April 13, 2016

Our neighbors the wildlife rehabilitators had been caring for this swift fox (Vulpes velox) for months, and in mid-March Colorado Parks & Wildlife decided it could go free along the Apishapa River in the prairie-and-canyon country east of Walsenburg.

Sometimes all you get with wildlife releases is a phone video, as with Fortuna the bear, but this one was done by Jacob Way, a district wildlife manager with more photographic skill, so thanks, Jacob.

For more on swift fox conservation efforts — in other words, trying to forestall a federal "threatened" listing with the complications that would bring — read about Colorado Parks & Wildlife's Swift Fox Conservation Team. You will find information on range, habitat, and so on, including the answer to the vital question, "What's the difference between swift foxes and kit foxes"?

Vulpes velox— is that a cool scientific name or what? As for the river, most people say ah-PISH-pa or ah-PISH-uh-pa. It is supposed to come from a Ute name meaning "stinking (stagnant) water," since its flow usually slows down to almost nothing in after the spring runoff.

April 10, 2016

At the end of the Civil War, H. H. McConnell had served in a Union volunteer regiment (i.e., not Regular Army) — he does not say which one — but he had not had enough soldiering.

So he re-enlists in the Regulars, trains at Carlisle Barracks in Pennsylvania, and after a few weeks boards a steamboat for Galveston, Texas, with a new draft of troopers for the 6th Cavalry, stationed on the northern Texas frontier at Fort Richardson.

Being already experienced, literate, and probably not a raging alcoholic, he is quickly promoted to first sergeant of his company.

This is not a book about campaigns and generals, but it is filled with social history — the inside story of how things worked. Is a Spencer carbine missing from the company weapons inventory? Have the company "affidavit man" swear that the last deserter certainly took it with him.

Just a few highlights:

• For the first years, the troopers spend less time patroling and more time building or re-building posts abandoned at the start of the war, or altogether new. "Armed laborers," McConnell calls them.

Nevertheless, the top brass announce that the Comanches and Kiowas are no longer a menace to the settlers. The surviving settlers beg to differ. Government policy vacillates between a military solution to the "Indian problem" and the "win them over with love" approach of certain Quaker Indian agents. It's too much like Vietnam or the current campaign against the Islamic state.

• Not just officers but enlisted men, even privates, are addressed as "Sir" in a very 18th-century style. "Who gave you permission to go fishing last Sunday, sir?" Sgt. McConnell is angrily asked by the colonel in one incident.

• They seem to have enough weapons, but not enough horses. When the whole regiment is transferred, at least a third of the troopers march on foot.

"Buffalo soldier" reenactor, probably at Fort Sill (US Army photo).

• For the first time in his life, he encounters "colored soldiers," but he is less impressed by the "buffalo soldiers" of the 10th Cavalry at Fort Sill than by the black 38th Infantry stationed for a time at Fort Richardson. Of the latter, he writes, "Many of them were exceedingly clean and neat as soldiers and were often selected as 'orderlies' for the officer of the day," whereas the "buffalo soldiers" of the 10th he dismisses as "unsoldierlike and slovenly." (Don't tell the reenactors!)

Yet since most of the black soldiers are illiterate, having been born as slaves, their white officers are unable to delegate paperwork in the same way that Sgt. McConnell handles much of his own company's. Consequently, they are better officers:

The company officers of white regiments have very little of the detail of their companies to bother them — competent Sergeants and clerks are always to be had, who relieve them of such duties. Not so with the colored troops; every detail of duty, looking after their sanitary interests, performing the clerical work, the books, papers, and the thousand and one things that go to make up the routine of life in the service, all must be attended to by the officers themselves. [Because they thus gain practical knowledge and carry more responsibility, this] accounts for the marked efficiency I have noticed among them as a class.

• Heretical as it may sound coming from a cavalryman, he writes that the infantry could often function better in the field against the Indians:

I should observe here that the Indians greatly preferred to fight cavalry, or mounted citizens, to fighting infantry, for the obvious reason that, owing to their superior and, in fact, unequaled horsemanship, they had their enemies at a very great disadvantage . . . It took our people a long time to find out that a dozen infantrymen with "long toms" [rifles that out-ranged the cavalry carbines], riding in a six-mule government wagon, were more dreaded by the Indian than a whole squadron of cavalry or [Texas] rangers; but in the last days of Indian fighting or scouting this became the usual mode of arming and equipping parties of soldiers.

• Oh yes, the fabled Texas Rangers. McConnell's considered opinion:

These Rangers were tolerable Indian fighters, but most of their time was occupied in terrorizing the citizens and "taking in the town." Shooting scrapes and rows between citizens, soldiers, and Rangers in this year (1874) were so frequent [that Jacksboro voted to incorporate in order to have government and a city marshall]

• One stereotype that he supports is the predominance of Irish immigrants in the Army: "Nearly all the old soldiers in my time were Irishmen (by old soldiers I mean those of fifteen or twenty years service)" and he calls the Irishman "the best soldier in our army."

Other nationalities were represented too — many Germans and some French, among others. The Franco-Prussian war of 1870–71 was echoed in the barracks by brawls between the nationalities. The French were "few in number [but] they made up for it in an excess of patriotism."

But the Germans had the best of it; the majority of the [regimental] band was from the "Fatherland," and the "Wacht am Rhine" and other of their national airs were played morning, noon and night, to the disgust of the "enemy."

After further brawling, the officers "prohibited the playing of the aggravating tunes for the time being."

April 09, 2016

Helen Macdonald, author of H Is for Hawk, a memoir about death, nature, falconry, T. H. White, and becoming feral and then human again, which has won all sorts of prizes, labors at signing her name on dozens of shelf copies for the Tattered Cover bookstore in Denver last Thursday night.

"I get absolutely off my face on Sharpie fumes," she said. "It's how I get my kicks these days."

Her column for the New York Times has ended, so I will be removing it from the blogrolls, but she explained further at dinner after the signing that she will be writing longer nature-and-culture essays for the paper.

I once performed emergency repairs on a '69 VW bus after chocking its wheels with rocks partway up the Moki Dugway.

But never Colorado National Monument. Superstition? I would be driving on I-70 or riding the California Zephyr, look south as I left Grand Junction, westward bound, and think "Oh yeah, got to go there some time."

Maybe it's my uneasy relationship with Grand Junction. It's twenty miles across and one story tall, all highways and arterial roads so that least you can get through it quickly. A once-small town has spread like a quart of oil spilled on the garage floor.

It's a place where I occasionally rent a motel room — once M. and I, younger and poorer, rented a room in a now-vanished SRO hotel — probably the only overnight guests they had had in a long time — and someone coughed himself to death all night in the adjoining room.

I was covering some off-road race for a start-up car-racing mag (The Whitewater 200? Something like that.) and had an expense account of about $20. The magazine folded. Now "off-road race" is more likely to refer to a contest of Spandex-clad bro-cyclists.

And there is a the family angle. I can walk down Main Street and see where my maternal grandfather and his brother ran variously a furniture store, a rod-and-gun shop, and the Personal Loan Company. The house on North 7th Street where my grandparents lived until their divorce still stands.

(In addition, one of my older sisters was born in GJ, and the other lived here for some time when first married.)

So maybe it is my feeling of estrangement from that older side of the family (with a couple of exceptions) that makes me feel twice a stranger here, where I sit typing in a tiny studio apartment rented on Airbnb.com. At times I keep imagining that the Jeep has an out-of-state license plate, which is a sort of cognitive hallucination. It's been years since Colorado stopped coding license plates to county of issuance. You can't tell who is local and who is not from their plates anymore.

We have spent two days hiking in Colorado National Monument — back to red sandstone, screaming flocks of scrub jays, and the bitter, resiny taste of ephedra leaves in my mouth — self-medication for spring allergies. Gambel's quail dart along the road and bighorn ewes and lambs cause "critter jams" on Rim Rock Drive.

Back on the Colorado Plateau, and why didn't we come here sooner? Spring is the best time.